Great post Mr Carter! But I think this sentence in your article says it all:
Left-wingers hate deregulation and tax breaks because it limits the control they can exert over people. Yet, at the same time, they love the idea of “community” and “local”.
It's going to be a long hard slog to pry their hands off the throats of the American people but it's a journey well worth making! Is there a roll for VC's like you?
North Carolina is reducing its corporate tax from 2.5% to zero by 2030. This is all due to the Republicans in the State legislature having a plan ten years ago to lower personal and corporate taxes and then enacting the plan.
In my county of 120,000 people in North Carolina, where the largest town has 15,000 people, there are many non profits which are funded with millions of dollars and seemingly all duplicate the services they each provide. There’s something seriously wrong with the non profit charities here if they’re all very well funded, are all addressing the same issues, yet no issues are ever solved. They just keep asking for more money. These charities should have to provide metrics on their success. If they can’t, they should be shut down.
My professional life has focused on the data side of 'charities' albeit mostly overseas. I've seen the mentality change over the decades from "We're working ourselves out of a job" -- i.e. solving this or that problem -- to the total and exclusive mentality of "NGO *industry*", complete with obsession over revenue and positioning and quarterlies about how busy the staff of the NGO have been, not the impact anything they did might have had or more likely didn't. My line of work has gone from seeking valid & reliable empirical evidence of the extent to which this or that intervention created or catalyzed the expected (positive) change, to really something like chaos - NGOs only want to know how they can manipulate results to get more money, mostly from the government, and evaluators spend more time navel-gazing about "ways of knowing" peculiar to the niche flavor of the day and policing each others' colonizing thoughts than strengthening their own methodological rigor, much less learning to apply appropriate tools correctly in challenging real-world conditions. The dominance of grift culture is nauseating.
You are exactly right that there is something seriously wrong. The snake oil - to - substance ratio is obscene.
Love this. Reminds me of reading Atlas Shrugged. Leftist government never builds anything. They are parasitic money launderers. I do, however believe strongly in localized control. Get the federal government out of the states, except to police corruption. Get the state governments out of the local, again except to police corruption. But there are too many power hungry busybodies on this country that can’t just leave other people alone. And they also don’t seem to understand the concept of cause and effect. I guess short of a true Revolution, this reality will never really change because the people that propagate this madness seem to control most of the power and wealth in this country.
I enjoyed that column. Hilarious (and sad) that you were not invited back to the TIF committee. Government workers simply do not think about Capitalist initiatives and perspective. Labor in Government is driving the jobs growth these days and it needs to slow down. #KeepItUp Jeff!
Wow, great topic and information with solid suggestions. I did say many times during the lockdowns, "Lawsuits and entrepreneurs are going to boom". Many lawsuits, e.g. wrt takings, are still grinding forward yet we are starting to see some claims and challenges adjudicated to much more reasonable and Constitutional outcomes than happened during the moral panic.
Regarding small trends boosting entrepreneurial activity, I don't have any data but my guess was then, and remains, that many saw in their own lives how badly lockdowns & mandates played out for those locked into big orgs, and want to get into a very different position before the next faux freak-out is shoved down our throats. Whether damage & suffering hit a person as part of a large org or as a small business, or simply personally, there's an obvious appeal in less vulnerability to arbitrary overreach, so extricating from Leviathan whatever you can, wherever and however you can, just makes common, intuitive sense.
There's added momentum from increasing evidence of fraud and corruption motivating the overreach. More & more people find it difficult to ignore or even downplay the fact that the most devastating diktats were not at all well-intentioned ideas going wrong, but conscious and intentional disregard at best -- really, pure contempt. Authorities have backed themselves into a desperate corner, highly volatile and dangerous for the next few years at least. The more of us who can diversify our resources - economic, relational (socio political), and tangible - the less vulnerable we all will be.
You wrote "Left-wingers hate deregulation and tax breaks because it limits the control they can exert over people. Yet, at the same time, they love the idea of “community” and “local”.
The leftist types don't really like the words "community" and "local." They know the public does, so they use those words, but they want the local community to look like every other local community in the country and all be dictated to by some federal agency so they can a) get federal funds to implement their big-city redevelopment plans and b) point to the federal government's rules on why they can't succeed in implementing workable reforms in the community.
Here in Alaska, we see it in the ongoing debate on how we heat and light our homes -- oh, God, the carbon-footprint - in a place where heating your home is not optional (it was -40'F last week at this time). Or...home maintenance not done by homeowners was done by handymen for decades. The only state requirement was that they carry liability insurance up to $1 million so if they damaged someone's house, everybody would be covered. It cost less than a $1,000 a year. Then the federal government to the side of the labor unions and said handyman needed to get a $20,000 contractor's license (on top of the liability insurance) to work. The IBEW said they were "stealing" work from the "brotherhood" and also endangering the public. Except licensed electricians in this state won't do a residential electrical repair -- they don't make enough money to make it worth their while.
Faced with most if not all of their profits being eaten up in license fees, handyman firms closed by the droves, the remaining ones now charge A LOT for simple repairs, and are never available because there are too few of them, and so you have homeowners with questionable electrical (plumbing, sheetrocking, painting, etc.) skills back doing their own repairs...badly. But hey, we're all safer...so not!
Just got done listening to the book FDR's Folly's by Jim Powell- should be mandatory reading for all high school kids taking American History. You see, along with diving into the damages inflicted on the US of A by Woodrow Wilson, the foundations for the insanity we now call government here in this country. Jeff, you have nailed it once again. It is decentralization, it is taking things back to their roots, small towns and allowing the maximum amount of freedom, deregulation and doing away with useless and pointless fees, laws and requirements that will bring back a much needed economic and social shot in the arm to places everywhere. We have become a nation of people who would have a hard time surviving without the government to tell us what to do, where to go etc. We need to bring it back to small businesses, which FDR went after with everything he had. He knew if he could break that he would be on his way to centralized, authoritarian government, of the sort Uncle Joe was practicing over there in the USS of R, with all of them Ruskies doing his bidding.(I did spelled that out in my best Slim Pickens' voice)
The number of things that need to be rolled back are to many to count. We could start by cutting 10% of every agency in D.C. and over the next ten years return all of that back to the states, if they so choose to engage in all or some of those activities. This has always been a concerted effort to splinter American's at the local level and make them dependent on big brother. We are so badly in need of a dose of personal responsibility for our actions and all that comes with that.
I agree it was a great article and agree with your suggestions but we need more than that. I apologize for my consistent rants that every solution is not economic. We need cultural solutions to support the economic policies that your support. The problem is that the cultural solutions won't come from government. They will come from media, academia, etc. In a perfect world here is what they would be;
1) More movies, books , etc. about self reliance as a virtue. Same with "middle class" values like prudence, hard work, etc.
2) Less societal worship of money, especially inherited money, and more appreciation of honesty and integrity.
3) A legal code that personally punishes corporate transgression.
4) A mocking of celebrity culture and "influencers".
5) A return to decency and patriotism as civic virtues. Less sex. More love.
I am sure there are more. These are necessary more than anything else, because right now in society, that book store owner in the article is significantly lower on our totem pole that Adam Newman from We Work, for example. If Epstein were still alive, she would be below him too, sadly. Money should not be the determiner of a life well lead. It should be the other way around. Until that sea change, nothing happens.
You're not wrong but the trick is how we get there from here (which is also the sticking point in some of the recommended policy changes, to be sure). Economic incentives absolutely change behavior, whether it is millions of people deciding to try some other light beer or a law or policy shift altering costs and ROI for farmers versus tech bros. I'm less clear on (and more skeptical of) non-economic mechanisms for cultural change that are constructive and effective except very incrementally and over the long haul.
It has to start in the schools, which means it is a multigenerational change. But it was a multigenerational change in the other direction that got us into this mess in the first place.
Agreed, and indications around the country of sane people getting on their local school boards are certainly encouraging. Unfortunately it was multigenerational destruction, before, which is always easier than construction. It may take multi-multi generations to re-establish less perverse school systems, and we'll never be able to let down our vigilance as long as big money/government are waiting in the wings. Change in a better direction needs to happen, regardless, including more schools that are more independent of federal / state money or bureaucrats and more competition and choice across the education landscape overall.
Being from Chicago, I've had lots of opportunity to laugh at the "TIF" conversation.
Favoring the mega-bigbox-developments is just wrong for most places. Charles Marohn at StrongTowns.org has been railing on the need to build sustainable communities for a decade. Adding the extra lane on the "stroad" to the big box is gonna need to be redone every five years. Is the revenue from the big box gonna pay for that? Many of the "small businesses on Main Street" generate way more revenue per acre.
It was a good Free Press article! I think there's room for both non-profit and for-profit. Looking at the northern ME town where we have our summer camp. There are a lot of local for profit businesses that have cropped up and helped buoy the town. Interestingly though, a bit thing up there is that a local non-profit group formed and leased the closed ski area from the delinquent owner for $1/year and has been keeping it chugging along for over a decade now. Hopefully that eventually turns into a for-profit business, but it hasn't yet.
That FP article is awesome and I hope more of your readers subscribe to them - they're doing great work.
Great post Mr Carter! But I think this sentence in your article says it all:
Left-wingers hate deregulation and tax breaks because it limits the control they can exert over people. Yet, at the same time, they love the idea of “community” and “local”.
It's going to be a long hard slog to pry their hands off the throats of the American people but it's a journey well worth making! Is there a roll for VC's like you?
North Carolina is reducing its corporate tax from 2.5% to zero by 2030. This is all due to the Republicans in the State legislature having a plan ten years ago to lower personal and corporate taxes and then enacting the plan.
In my county of 120,000 people in North Carolina, where the largest town has 15,000 people, there are many non profits which are funded with millions of dollars and seemingly all duplicate the services they each provide. There’s something seriously wrong with the non profit charities here if they’re all very well funded, are all addressing the same issues, yet no issues are ever solved. They just keep asking for more money. These charities should have to provide metrics on their success. If they can’t, they should be shut down.
My professional life has focused on the data side of 'charities' albeit mostly overseas. I've seen the mentality change over the decades from "We're working ourselves out of a job" -- i.e. solving this or that problem -- to the total and exclusive mentality of "NGO *industry*", complete with obsession over revenue and positioning and quarterlies about how busy the staff of the NGO have been, not the impact anything they did might have had or more likely didn't. My line of work has gone from seeking valid & reliable empirical evidence of the extent to which this or that intervention created or catalyzed the expected (positive) change, to really something like chaos - NGOs only want to know how they can manipulate results to get more money, mostly from the government, and evaluators spend more time navel-gazing about "ways of knowing" peculiar to the niche flavor of the day and policing each others' colonizing thoughts than strengthening their own methodological rigor, much less learning to apply appropriate tools correctly in challenging real-world conditions. The dominance of grift culture is nauseating.
You are exactly right that there is something seriously wrong. The snake oil - to - substance ratio is obscene.
Love this. Reminds me of reading Atlas Shrugged. Leftist government never builds anything. They are parasitic money launderers. I do, however believe strongly in localized control. Get the federal government out of the states, except to police corruption. Get the state governments out of the local, again except to police corruption. But there are too many power hungry busybodies on this country that can’t just leave other people alone. And they also don’t seem to understand the concept of cause and effect. I guess short of a true Revolution, this reality will never really change because the people that propagate this madness seem to control most of the power and wealth in this country.
I enjoyed that column. Hilarious (and sad) that you were not invited back to the TIF committee. Government workers simply do not think about Capitalist initiatives and perspective. Labor in Government is driving the jobs growth these days and it needs to slow down. #KeepItUp Jeff!
Fabulous assessment.
Margaret Thatcher used to say Russia would be the most powerful country in Europe if it would adopt capitalism to leverage its natural assets.
JLM
www.themusingsofthebigredcar.com
Wow, great topic and information with solid suggestions. I did say many times during the lockdowns, "Lawsuits and entrepreneurs are going to boom". Many lawsuits, e.g. wrt takings, are still grinding forward yet we are starting to see some claims and challenges adjudicated to much more reasonable and Constitutional outcomes than happened during the moral panic.
Regarding small trends boosting entrepreneurial activity, I don't have any data but my guess was then, and remains, that many saw in their own lives how badly lockdowns & mandates played out for those locked into big orgs, and want to get into a very different position before the next faux freak-out is shoved down our throats. Whether damage & suffering hit a person as part of a large org or as a small business, or simply personally, there's an obvious appeal in less vulnerability to arbitrary overreach, so extricating from Leviathan whatever you can, wherever and however you can, just makes common, intuitive sense.
There's added momentum from increasing evidence of fraud and corruption motivating the overreach. More & more people find it difficult to ignore or even downplay the fact that the most devastating diktats were not at all well-intentioned ideas going wrong, but conscious and intentional disregard at best -- really, pure contempt. Authorities have backed themselves into a desperate corner, highly volatile and dangerous for the next few years at least. The more of us who can diversify our resources - economic, relational (socio political), and tangible - the less vulnerable we all will be.
You wrote "Left-wingers hate deregulation and tax breaks because it limits the control they can exert over people. Yet, at the same time, they love the idea of “community” and “local”.
The leftist types don't really like the words "community" and "local." They know the public does, so they use those words, but they want the local community to look like every other local community in the country and all be dictated to by some federal agency so they can a) get federal funds to implement their big-city redevelopment plans and b) point to the federal government's rules on why they can't succeed in implementing workable reforms in the community.
Here in Alaska, we see it in the ongoing debate on how we heat and light our homes -- oh, God, the carbon-footprint - in a place where heating your home is not optional (it was -40'F last week at this time). Or...home maintenance not done by homeowners was done by handymen for decades. The only state requirement was that they carry liability insurance up to $1 million so if they damaged someone's house, everybody would be covered. It cost less than a $1,000 a year. Then the federal government to the side of the labor unions and said handyman needed to get a $20,000 contractor's license (on top of the liability insurance) to work. The IBEW said they were "stealing" work from the "brotherhood" and also endangering the public. Except licensed electricians in this state won't do a residential electrical repair -- they don't make enough money to make it worth their while.
Faced with most if not all of their profits being eaten up in license fees, handyman firms closed by the droves, the remaining ones now charge A LOT for simple repairs, and are never available because there are too few of them, and so you have homeowners with questionable electrical (plumbing, sheetrocking, painting, etc.) skills back doing their own repairs...badly. But hey, we're all safer...so not!
Just got done listening to the book FDR's Folly's by Jim Powell- should be mandatory reading for all high school kids taking American History. You see, along with diving into the damages inflicted on the US of A by Woodrow Wilson, the foundations for the insanity we now call government here in this country. Jeff, you have nailed it once again. It is decentralization, it is taking things back to their roots, small towns and allowing the maximum amount of freedom, deregulation and doing away with useless and pointless fees, laws and requirements that will bring back a much needed economic and social shot in the arm to places everywhere. We have become a nation of people who would have a hard time surviving without the government to tell us what to do, where to go etc. We need to bring it back to small businesses, which FDR went after with everything he had. He knew if he could break that he would be on his way to centralized, authoritarian government, of the sort Uncle Joe was practicing over there in the USS of R, with all of them Ruskies doing his bidding.(I did spelled that out in my best Slim Pickens' voice)
The number of things that need to be rolled back are to many to count. We could start by cutting 10% of every agency in D.C. and over the next ten years return all of that back to the states, if they so choose to engage in all or some of those activities. This has always been a concerted effort to splinter American's at the local level and make them dependent on big brother. We are so badly in need of a dose of personal responsibility for our actions and all that comes with that.
I agree it was a great article and agree with your suggestions but we need more than that. I apologize for my consistent rants that every solution is not economic. We need cultural solutions to support the economic policies that your support. The problem is that the cultural solutions won't come from government. They will come from media, academia, etc. In a perfect world here is what they would be;
1) More movies, books , etc. about self reliance as a virtue. Same with "middle class" values like prudence, hard work, etc.
2) Less societal worship of money, especially inherited money, and more appreciation of honesty and integrity.
3) A legal code that personally punishes corporate transgression.
4) A mocking of celebrity culture and "influencers".
5) A return to decency and patriotism as civic virtues. Less sex. More love.
I am sure there are more. These are necessary more than anything else, because right now in society, that book store owner in the article is significantly lower on our totem pole that Adam Newman from We Work, for example. If Epstein were still alive, she would be below him too, sadly. Money should not be the determiner of a life well lead. It should be the other way around. Until that sea change, nothing happens.
You're not wrong but the trick is how we get there from here (which is also the sticking point in some of the recommended policy changes, to be sure). Economic incentives absolutely change behavior, whether it is millions of people deciding to try some other light beer or a law or policy shift altering costs and ROI for farmers versus tech bros. I'm less clear on (and more skeptical of) non-economic mechanisms for cultural change that are constructive and effective except very incrementally and over the long haul.
It has to start in the schools, which means it is a multigenerational change. But it was a multigenerational change in the other direction that got us into this mess in the first place.
Agreed, and indications around the country of sane people getting on their local school boards are certainly encouraging. Unfortunately it was multigenerational destruction, before, which is always easier than construction. It may take multi-multi generations to re-establish less perverse school systems, and we'll never be able to let down our vigilance as long as big money/government are waiting in the wings. Change in a better direction needs to happen, regardless, including more schools that are more independent of federal / state money or bureaucrats and more competition and choice across the education landscape overall.
Being from Chicago, I've had lots of opportunity to laugh at the "TIF" conversation.
Favoring the mega-bigbox-developments is just wrong for most places. Charles Marohn at StrongTowns.org has been railing on the need to build sustainable communities for a decade. Adding the extra lane on the "stroad" to the big box is gonna need to be redone every five years. Is the revenue from the big box gonna pay for that? Many of the "small businesses on Main Street" generate way more revenue per acre.
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2024/2/2/citizen-development-higher-value-per-acre
It was a good Free Press article! I think there's room for both non-profit and for-profit. Looking at the northern ME town where we have our summer camp. There are a lot of local for profit businesses that have cropped up and helped buoy the town. Interestingly though, a bit thing up there is that a local non-profit group formed and leased the closed ski area from the delinquent owner for $1/year and has been keeping it chugging along for over a decade now. Hopefully that eventually turns into a for-profit business, but it hasn't yet.
That FP article is awesome and I hope more of your readers subscribe to them - they're doing great work.